Three years can feel like a lifetime and still be as fresh as yesterday in our emotions. April 23rd, 2013 Norbert Blei left this earth and all of us and all we loved and all he loved. Three years this month since our last morning together, since last waking to see his face next to mine … leaving all of us an emptier world without his rumbling voice and incomparable laughter.

Many people who loved Norbert Blei have come together in ways that honor him and carry on his legacy of stewardship for the life of writers.

After the shock of his loss settled into our being with a private service for him, a fittingly grand Memorial was planned for June, 2013. Set in the theatre of Peninsula Players near Fish Creek, Norb’s friends and relatives from all over the midwest and beyond came to say goodbye and to hear his words set free in the open air.

Norb’s special friend, pastor Michael Brecke welcomed those attending, and introduced the folk singers, musicians and writers who sang and read for him: Julian Hagen, Pete Thelen, Jay Whitney; Jeanne Kuhns gifted us with an original song composed for Norb. Writers Marty Robinson, Marianne Ritzer, Robert Zoschke, Alice D’Alessio and Al DeGenova read passages from Norb’s work; Annika Johnson brought goats and family memories of her father and Norb’s friendship, to everyone’s delight. Tim Stone shared his deep feelings for Norb gained through many years of working and advocating for him at The Clearing, a place Norb loved dearly.

At the conclusion of this amazing afternoon, Norbert’s beloved son and daughter, Christopher and Bridget invited all to gather at the Edgewood Orchard Gallery for gnoshing and a final toast to their Father. It was as grand a time as anyone could wish for, honoring this unique person in our lives.

But it didn’t stop there.

Wanting to preserve Norbert’s infamous chicken coop, his writing “studio” for posterity, Bridget and Chris donated the building to the Write On Door County! center for writers at Juddville. After an anxiety ridden year of fund raising, moving plans and a successful ride down Highway 42 – the infamous Blei Coop now stands proudly in the sun where the loving hands and inspired efforts of Anne Emerson, Jerod Santek and many others stand watch over his precious legacy.

There exists for Norb a core of students who attended his summer workshops at The Clearing year after year, some continuously over 25 years. I lovingly refer to them as the Blei-Tribe. Within days after his death, many of us began sharing essays written which Norb had requested from a number of us; these were to focus on the meaning writing had in our lives and the impact of The Clearing. Norb’s intent was to gather these into a chapbook dedicated to The Clearing.

We soon discovered that central in all of them was also the impact of having had Norb as teacher. As we read each other’s work, the mission became clear to go forward with the chapbook he had intended. “The Professor’s Quarters” came into being early in 2014. This same Blei-Tribe then raised the funds to get it to publication, proudly donating cases of the book to The Clearing, the proceeds to go to their “Norbert Blei Scholarship Fund”. It can be found there at the book store.

In the winter of 2013, the Board of the Council for Wisconsin Writers renamed its Nonfiction Book Award the Norbert Blei/August Derleth Nonfiction Book Award, to recognize Norb’s significant contribution to the Wisconsin literary archive. This wonderful honor was the start of others that continue to bring Norb’s work to our attention.

Norb’s blues-belting friend Pete Thelan originated an idea for a local scholarship to be awarded to promising young writers from the Gibraltar high school. Funded by ten of Norb’s family members and friends, this spring 2016 will mark the third year that $1,000 scholarship will be given in Norb’s honor to a graduating senior.

The intensive efforts of Norbert’s former publisher, friend Dave Pichaske, archiving Norb’s extensive body of work and making contact with UW Madison Library officials, resulted in the UW accepting Norb’s work into the hallowed halls in summer of 2014. Eventually his historical work, and much which was never published will be available to all on-line, thanks to Pichaske’s exhaustive efforts.

A chilly but festive afternoon in May 2015 brought more reading and memories of Norbert as the Write On! Board of Directors hosted an Open House to dedicate the Coop to its new life of service. John Nelson presided over nearly a full day of music and voices honoring Norbert: Susan O’Leary, Pete Thelan, Jay Whitney, Al DeGenova, Charlie Rossiter, Jeanne Kuhns Mark Raddatz, Lars and Rolf Johnson, Charles Peterson, Kaaren Weiss, Tim Stone and the poets of Door County all united in music, in poetry and in love, for Norbert Blei.

It continues: Susan O’Leary and Al DeGenova, former teaching partners of Norb’s, have each stepped up to carry on the tradition, offering their own flights of word wizardry at workshops in the holy grounds of The Clearing.

In 2015, John and Karen Yancey created the first annual “Norbert Blei Literary Award” to be announced during the Washington Island Literary Fest on Washington Island. One of Norb’s former students herself, Karen contributed her time and efforts in establishing the event, and the Yanceys donated the funds to award winners Catherine Jagoe (Poetry) and Sue Wentz (Short Story) each a $250 check for their winning work.

We are not yet finished.

These events form a continuing legacy honoring Norbert, even as new ones spring into being. In October 2016, the Sister Bay Unitarian Universalist Fellowship will host a showing of Norb’s prolific, but lesser known work in water color painting. There will be a reading of his work at the opening, with his paintings available for viewing throughout the month of October. Many will be surprised to learn that he was a talented artist as well as writer. As Norbert would say: the beat goes on …

For all of this, and for all of you who’ve made these significant events happen: I can hardly express how deeply grateful I am as I hear in my heart, Norbert’s proud chuckle.

Shantih ~ Jude

***

“The Bible says we are dust and shall return to dust. But we are much more than dust. We are energy which is interchangeable with light. We are fire and water and earth. We are air and atoms and quarks. We are dreams and hopes and fears held together by wisdom and driven apart by folly. So much more than dust. What the Bible should say is: … You were a miracle and we return you to the mystery from which you came”.

These classes are taught in the tradition of renowned writer and teacher Norbert Blei (1935-2013), who passed the torch of his 40+ year writing class at The Clearing to Albert DeGenova and Susan O’Leary (Susan will be teaching “The Writer’s Craft,” May 8-14, 2016 also at The Clearing). Albert will be continuing Norb’s vision of a week that includes introductory and advanced classes, individual conferences, and the camaraderie of a community of writers.

For Burgeoning Writers. This class will explore the major areas of creative writing: poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. Students will consider various writing techniques, discuss journal writing, poetry and prose poems, short story writing, the personal essay and blogs, and the significance of poetic devices as the basis of all creative writing, what “story” means in our lives, as well as an overview of the promises of publication. Class sessions will be devoted to discussion, in-class writing, and constructive criticism. No one need feel intimidated or out of place regardless of age, background or ability…all that is a required is the urge and desire to write.

“Writing in Rhythm”

From Walt Whitman, to the jazz of the Beats, to Break Beat hip-hop poetry, writers put life into words on the page by recreating the music and rhythms of everyday conversation. While focusing on readings from authors with an acute rhythmic sensibility and an ear for conversation, this class will explore how “writing what you hear come in the window” (as Jack Kerouac put it) can enliven prose, as well as inform the crafting of free verse lines. Students will be challenged to hear the music and rhythm in the words around them, those on the page, and those they write themselves.

Core reading:

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Juno Diaz

Coming Through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje

The Dead Emcee Scrolls by Saul Williams

Optional reading (recommended but not required):

Old Angel Midnight by Jack Kerouac

Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, by Langston Hughes

Song of Myself, by Walt Whitman

Lit: A Memoir, by Mary Karr

Advanced Writing Individual Conferences

Afternoon Section: For practicing writers (any genre) with some history of publication, Albert will schedule individual meetings with advanced students who submit manuscript excerpts and/or writing projects to him one month in advance of class (10-page maximum). For further information (and before submitting materials), please contact Albert: al.degenova@yahoo.com.

Independent Study

Open to anyone with a desire to spend a week at The Clearing during the writing workshop session. No class work, writing assignments, or reading obligations. Consider yourself welcome to monitor the writing classes and programs. This could be a valuable week of insights into the writing life. Recommended as well for people who love to read and would enjoy spending a week as part of a community of fine writers.

The Clearing

Write, relax, learn…getaway from it all!!! This is famed landscape architect Jens Jensen’s dream come true. Read Albert’s essay on his relationship to The Clearing and Norbert Blei here: “Jensen’s Great Poem.”

Norbert Blei Literary Award

Washington Island, September 19, 2015

In 2013, founders and supporters of the Trueblood Performing Arts Center on Washington Island, just north of the Door County mainland, created a grandly successful Literary Festival, bringing authors and readers together for three days of island living, tours, presentations, dinners and workshops. http://truebloodpac.com/3rd-annual-washington-island-literary-festival/

The success of the first year insured the continuing efforts of the many reading enthusiasts on the island, and most recently of the Elizabeth Wallman family, Dick Purintin, Karen Yancy and Jerod Santek of the Write On! Center for Writers. At the second such event, it was learned that island residents John and Karen Yancey had provided the funds and dedication needed to establish the first ever “Norbert Blei Literature Award” in the categories of Poetry and Short Story.

Over the course of the subsequent year, writers everywhere were encouraged to submit their work to the contest, with winners to be hosted and announced at the 2015 Literary Festival. Judges for the event were Jean Feraca of Madison, WI and NPR fame, and Judith Barisonzi, retired professor of English Lit at the UW Fond du Lac and UW-BC, and adept at short story.

The winners in both categories each received a prize of $250 and were provided registration and lodging to attend the event. Names were announced in early September by founder of the contest, KarenYancey. They were introduced and given their Awards during the Literary Fest by Jude Genereaux, Norb’s partner prior to his death in April 2013, who noted “Norb would be greatly proud of this event; his love for the art of writing and the support he gave to writers throughout his lifetime was well known, as well as his love of Washington Island”.

The award winner for the Norbert Blei Award in Poetry is Catherine Jagoe of Madison, WI, for her poem The Bargain. Catherine is a freelance translator and recently won a Pushcart Prize, as well as the Council for Wisconsin Writers 2014 Kay W. Levin Award for an essay in Gettysburg Review. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Casting Off (Parallel Press 2007) and News form the North (Finishing Line Press 2015); her poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and Poetry Daily. Ms Jagoe’s poetry and creative nonfiction have been published in numerous literary magazines, and she is a contributor to WI Public Radio’s “Wisconsin Life” series. She has a website at http://www.catherinejagoe.com

First Place in Short Story went to Sue Wentz of Portage, WI. Sue notes that she was “privileged to have been mentored by the great Norbert Blei”. Her literary novella The Bluff was first published by Blei’s Cross+Roads Press in 2003. Her second book, Servant to the Wolf, a young adult historical, was originally published by Echelon Press. Sue is a former winner of the Wisconsin Writers Association Jade Ring Contest, Al P. Nelson Feature Essay contest and she is a two time winner of WWA’s Florence Lindemann Humor Essay contest.

Two Honorable Mentions in Poetry were also acknowledged: Sheryl Slocum of Milwaukee, for her poem Gravity, and Georgia Ressmeyer of Sheboyan, WI for Sea Level Rising, which was read to those attending by poet Sharon Auberle.

Several of Norbert’s former students and authors were in the audience to honor the recipients and take part in the third, very successful Washington Island Literary Festival.

všechno nejlepší k narozeninám !

Norbert Blei Writing Workshop

Albert DeGenova

August 2 – August 8, 2015

This class is in the tradition of Norbert Blei (1935- 2013)—a week that includes introductory and advanced classes. Students choose one of these options when registering: Class #50: Overview of Creative Writing for beginning writers. (Class meets in mornings.) Class #51: First-person confessional for advanced writers. (Class meets in afternoons.) Class #52: Independent Study.

Overview Of Creative Writing: For burgeoning writers, this class will explore the major areas of creative writing: poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Writing techniques, journal writing, poetry and prose poems, short story writing, personal essay, blogs, the significance of poetic devices as the basis of all creative writing, what “story” means in our lives, and an overview of the promises of publication will be discussed. Sessions will be devoted to discussion, in-class writing and constructive criticism. All that is required is the urge and desire to write.

First-Person Confessional: As “autobiographical” detail has become the norm in contemporary writing, this class will look at how the confessional writers opened the door to the 21st century phenomena which is slam poetry and the explosion of personal memoir onto the best-seller lists. With a focus on this writing genre, the class will explore how much confession is too much. Poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath let their first-person personas detail personal experiences deeper and more honestly than any women who had preceded them. Their “confessional” style was courageous, but not without criticism. Students will examine their own writing for those recurring themes of personal experience and detail that may or may not enhance their work. Core reading: Selected Poems of Anne Sexton by Anne Sexton, Ariel by Sylvia Plath and Loose Woman by Sandra Cisneros. Additional readings: The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes and Big Sur by Jack Kerouac.

Advanced writers with some history of publication may schedule individual meetings with Albert if they submit manuscript excerpts and/or writing projects to him one month in advance of class. Please contact Albert at al.degenova@yahoo.com before submitting materials. Overview Of Creative Writing: For burgeoning writers, this class will explore the major areas of creative writing: poetry, fiction and nonfiction.

Independent Study: This is open to anyone with a desire to spend a week as part of a community of fine writers. There is no class work, and there are no writing assignments or reading obligations. You are welcome to join the writing classes and programs.

Albert Degenova began his studies with Norbert Blei in 1996. He is a poet, writer, editor and publisher. Albert is the author of four books of poetry, and for the past 30-plus years has worked as a journalist and marketing communications professional. In June of 2000, he launched the literary/arts journal After Hours, for which he continues as publisher and editor. In 2014, After Hours Press published The Professor’s Quarters, student perspectives on Norbert Blei and his class at The Clearing. Albert holds a master of fine art in writing and is an adjunct professor at Concordia University in River Forest, Illinois. He is also a blues saxophonist and a one-time contributing editor to Down Beat magazine.

Corbin Buff is currently a senior at Stroudsburg High School. This is his first year on the Mountaineer newspaper staff. Corbin also plays tennis for Stroudsburg’s boys tennis team.

Norbert Blei: a Grandson Remembers

It has been said before that the highest form of art is life itself—the art of life. The idea being that a life well-lived, a human being who has sculpted not simply clay or marble, but their world view and inner essence, shines forth more brilliantly than any ordinary work of art. Walking paintings, breathing sculptures, symphonies that write and rewrite themselves each second; these are the highest strivings of the artist—to become what Henry Miller would call a “living book:” a man or woman who has shaped him or herself into a verifiable work of art.

Norbert Blei was one of these living books. For my grandfather, it was not enough that the books be written. The books are, of course, wonderful and immensely important, but I have always felt that they were part of the bigger work: the life, the man himself. Norbert Blei embodied every book he had ever written, every book he had ever read. And at the same time, he realized that helping other artists along the way, laughing, giving gifts, and any other single action was worth just as much as a book or painting, especially when added up over the course of a lifetime. More simply put, it is both the big and the small things that count.

I don’t think I need to talk about the big things—the books. This is certainly not to undermine them, or what my grandfather achieved in their pages. Rather, it is simply that the books need no one to speak for them. They are there, waiting, and—all deities willing—always will be. And I do highly recommend you read them, if you haven’t already. But although my grandfather’s epitaph does in fact read “find me in my books,” I thought I might try to provide another way of finding Norbert Blei, particularly for anyone reading this who did not have the pleasure of meeting or interacting with him beyond the books. I think a portrait of my grandfather can be glimpsed through his actions; in this case the ones that stand out in my memory.

I mentioned earlier the idea of helping others, artists or not, along the way. I can personally testify that few calls for guidance that came Norbert Blei’s way were left unanswered. Indeed, I still have email after email of his, all written with patience, full of advice for the stuff I myself was writing in my preteen years. No work, however bad or unpolished, was deemed underserving of his attention—even my bizarre, amorphous hybrid poems, which at that point were some strange fusion of Robert Frost’s verse and the lyrics of the Grateful Dead. (I was later informed, somewhat to my chagrin, that he printed out and saved these now embarrassing experiments of my past… That’s how much they meant to him)

I believe I mentioned gifts earlier as well, and anyone who had a good relationship with Norbert Blei knows that he had a gift for giving gifts. For each Christmas and birthday, us grandchildren were given books, and, thanks to my grandfather, they always suited the reader perfectly. Although Norbert was obviously a “literary” writer/reader, he did not force his preferences on you. I suppose the idea was that if one fell in love with reading, they would be led to the “great books” soon enough on their own. I’m currently trying to read my way through the entirety of Kenneth Rexroth’s written work, but one does not start with such stuff. It would hardly interest a 10, 11, 12, 13-year-old, and my grandfather was aware of this. Science-fiction/fantasy books likeEragonorThe Rangers Apprentice (gifts of Grandpa’s) are the reason I fell in love with reading as a younger kid. “Love is easy,” as they say, and now reading anything (well—almost anything) is an easy and joyful experience. I owe that to my grandfather.

There were smaller gifts, too, like the gift of food. One of his favorite meals, both to make and to take others out for, was cheeseburgers and milkshakes. Being very chubby when I was younger, I can hardly say I disagreed with his taste. One of the saddest things I remember from my grandfather’s later years was seeing him lose his appetite. This was somewhat odd, as he never lost the love for cooking. My mother always joked that when she was growing up, Norbert used to make 10x more breakfast than anyone could eat, and things were no different when he visited us grandchildren. One of my favorite memories is of him working very hard at night on these Czech dumplings, which we ended up having for dinner. He saw that I liked them so much that he got up with me at 5:30 a.m. the next day and scrambled them into this massive hodgepodge of eggs, dumplings, and bacon. All before I had to leave for school.

One year we went to California to visit our aunt and uncle and grandmother for Christmas. Grandpa was there too. On the kitchen table of my aunt/uncle’s house was an elegant display of nuts and other snacks, where I would return constantly to consume every last cashew that had been put out, thinking that no one ever saw. Later though, when we got home to Pennsylvania, there was a box waiting in the mail for me from Norbert Blei. Weird, I thought. I had already received my customary birthday gift of books. What could it be? The box was opened to reveal a large can of salted cashews and a note: “Happy Birthday, Corb. Love, Grandpa Blei.”

I could go on and on with stories like this, but you hopefully get the idea. I just think it’s very important we all remember Norbert Blei the man, the father, the grandfather, the gift-giver, the cook and the food-lover, as much as we remember Norbert Blei the writer. I was fortunate to be close enough to him to witness all these multitudes, and thus consider myself lucky and blessed to be influenced by my grandfather not just in the sphere of writing and literature, but in my entire way of life. I hope the anecdotes I shared bring forth memories of your own time with Norbert, and shine light on who he was as a person for those of you not fortunate enough to have met him. — Corbin Buff

other Norbert Blei web pages

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The coop has flown

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Norbert Blei | 1935 – 2013

On the back roads of Door County again

Norbert Blei – 2012

Photo by Bobbie Krinsky

Norbert Blei – 2012

Photo by Jeffrey Winke

Norbert Blei – 2011

Photo by Sharon Auberle

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